The City Of Charlotte is named after a black woman?

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Queen Charlotte, wife of the English King George III (1738-1820), was directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. The riddle of Queen Charlotte's African ancestry was solved as a result of an earlier investigation into the black magi featured in 15th century Flemish paintings. Two art historians had suggested that the black magi must have been portraits of actual contemporary people (since the artist, without seeing them, would not have been aware of the subtleties in colouring and facial bone structure of quadroons or octoroons which these figures invariably represented) Enough evidence was accumulated to propose that the models for the black magi were, in all probability, members of the Portuguese de Sousa family.

(Several de Sousas had in fact traveled to the Netherlands when their cousin, the Princess Isabella went there to marry the Grand Duke, Philip the Good of Burgundy in the year 1429.)

Six different lines can be traced from English Queen Charlotte back to Margarita de Castro y Sousa, in a gene pool which because of royal inbreeding was already minuscule, thus explaining the Queen's unmistakable African appearance.

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I don't care about the amount of melanin present in people cities are named after. I have more important things going on in my life.

Well thats you, some people care about their history and American history.

An American genealogist has established that Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, was directly descended from the illegitimate son of an African mistress in the Portuguese royal house. Charlotte, then a 17-year-old German princess, arrived in England in September, 1761, and won public affection for her loyalty and devotion to the king even during his descent into madness. She bore him 15 children during a long and mainly happy marriage, but did not have the face of a classic European beauty.

Mario Valdes, a professional genealogist from Boston, Massachusetts, said: "People in the court noted her wide nose. Her personal physician, Baron Stockmar, said in his autobiography that she had a 'true mulatto (mixed race) face'. "Her African ancestry was certainly detectable and she wouldn't have looked as Helen Mirren depicted her in the film The Madness of King George."

Valdes has traced Charlotte's ancestry to the fifth king of Portugal, Afonso III, who had an illegitimate son with his Moorish mistress, Madalena Gil, in 1249. A small gene pool created by royal inbreeding perpetuated the physical African characteristics through the generations, he says.\

"Many of the state portraits of Queen Charlotte demonstrate quite clearly her mixed-race ancestry," he said.

"Although she is chronologically distant from Afonso III and his mistress, there is a surprising genealogical proximity between the two women and six lines of descent can be traced between them. What also contributed to the perceptibility of her African heritage was the highly inbred pattern of princely German marriage alliances."

Afonso III's Portuguese descendants confirmed the connection. Duarte Nuno Souso Chichorro Marcao, 63, who lives in Lisbon and has spent years studying royal ancestry, said he was a distant cousin of the Queen.

Gil was the daughter of Madrem, the Moorish king of the Algarve capital, and met Afonso after he conquered the city, he said. "Their son, Martin Afonso de Sousa Chicorro, later married into the Portuguese aristocracy and I have traced his descendants to the British royal family."

The colour of Gil and her son would have been of little consequence in Portugal at the time, as interracial marriages were tolerated and even encouraged. Their descendants later married into the German royal family. David Williamson of Debrett's, the peerage guide, said there had long been rumours of Queen Charlotte's link with a black branch of the Portuguese royal family, but he had not been aware of the research showing a direct link. "There may have been a link because there is a lot of Moorish blood in the Portuguese royal family and it has diffused over the rest of Europe," he said. The royal family's black ancestry has been welcomed by race relations activists.

Valerie Mason-John, who has written a play about a black royal throw back titled Brown Girl in the Ring, said: "Most people are not aware that the royal family has this black heritage. It is not only fascinating but many people would want to know just how diverse their background is because they are seen by many as the model family. "The fact that there are black people in the royal family just shows how we are all interconnected. It means that they are a family that reflect both us and our heritage. The problem is that in the past there was a reluctance to acknowledge this heritage."